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23

Breakfast at the Precipice

The Spreading Oaks Diner was warmly lighted. Every surface was clean, if not by Rebecca’s standards, certainly by the standards of 99 percent of customers, who—make no mistake about it—were clean themselves. In addition to booths, in one of which the amigos sat, the chrome-legged tables and chairs dated from a decade when manufacturers knew how tables and chairs should be made; they looked as if you could drive over them in a tank and only the tank would need to be repaired.

On the long counter that provided stools for lone customers, homemade cakes and pies rested on pedestals, under glass lids, as if they were sacred objects. The air was redolent of brewing coffee and a mélange of mouthwatering aromas.

Bobby didn’t want to be back in Maple Grove, but if he had to come home for Ernie, it was better to be here as an adult than as an adolescent. Back in the day, he would never have eaten in this diner because two of the teachers who ate here—the football coach and the shop instructor—could be just as snarky toward nerds as any kids who were part of the in-crowd. It was good to have grown up.

“I would love to paint this place,” Spencer said, “capture the sense of timelessness.”

“Why don’t you?” Bobby asked.

“Well, I can only paint when a fugue state overcomes me, which is only when I’m in my studio. And you might have forgotten, but I can’t draw worth a damn.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself, sweetie,” said Rebecca as she polished the table with a wet wipe.

A waitress named Flo took their order, and they ate breakfast (technically the second for Bobby, who always ate as if famished, yet never gained an ounce). All that needs to be said about the food is that it was delicious, providing fats and sugars in a multitude of forms.

“He was probably lying about not being from another planet,” Spencer said when they had puzzled aloud over other aspects of the recovered memory.

“I don’t think so,” Bobby said. “He was concealing things, but he didn’t seem like a liar. He maintained direct eye contact, and what he did say seemed to be consistent. The guy had this quality, very ... earthy. Besides, a visitor from another galaxy wouldn’t have a name like Wayne Louis Hornfly.”

“It sounds like a serial killer,” Rebecca said as she used a wet wipe to clean a smear of egg yolk from her empty plate. “They usually have three names with a certain rhythm to them. Judyface’s real name was John Willard Ironfork.”

“Yeah,” Bobby said. “Wouldn’t an extraterrestrial be named something like Baldar or Klaatu or Yoda?”

“Maybe,” Spencer suggested, “he’s an extraterrestrial who wants to be an Earth-style serial killer.”

Bobby shook his head. “He doesn’t want to be any kind of human being. Remember, he really, really hates humanity.”

Spencer took that to be confirmation of his theory. “There you go, then. He passes for human in order to be a serial killer and waste as many of us as he can.”

“Doesn’t that sound too convoluted to you?” Rebecca asked as she polished the flatware that she had used. “Stay focused on the details of what he said. Who or what are Alpha and Beta? What is Alpha doing on the third floor of County Memorial? Back in the day, did we ever look into that? I don’t think we did.”

“What’s to look into?” Spencer asked. “Alpha, Beta, third floor. There’s nothing to look into. There are no specifics.”

Bobby never got impatient with his amigos. Even after all these years, it was still only the rest of humanity that irritated him. With affection, he said, “Okay, okay. Listen, guys, we can’t just wait around for another recovered memory to tell us what to do. We all know what we have to do.”

“Visit Pastor Larry,” said Spencer, “and interrogate the shit out of him.”

“I’m good with that,” Rebecca said, putting away her package of wet wipes. She appeared, at least to Bobby, as if she were becoming less obsessive, because she didn’t want to stay at the table until Flo took the dishes away, allowing her to wipe the table again. She said, “But before we brace the reverend, I think we should check on Ernie. He’s been in that window seat more than twelve hours.”

“He’s okay. He’s either in suspended animation or dead,” Bobby said. As previously established, he was the least sentimental of the amigos, but it must be understood that he was nonetheless a good and caring person.

They left a 50 percent tip for Flo because she was the kind of woman they would have liked to have for a mother, paid for breakfast at the cash register up front, and stepped outside into a kind of hell.